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Yet he was a European titan, receiving ambassadors from the two Christian emperors, a humanistic patron of the arts with the greatest library outside Constantinople. Cordoba was now the biggest city in Europe along with Constantinople: its emperors sent gifts, marble fountains and Greek classics which the caliph had translated into Arabic. He built a new palace complex, Medina al-Zahra, probably named after a slave girl and modelled on the Umayya palace in Damascus, six miles outside Cordoba, with a colossal throne room built around a huge mercury pool, a menagerie of lions (a gift from his African allies) and one of Europe’s first flushing bathrooms at a time when London and Paris were tiny towns with open sewers. His court was cosmopolitan: his guards and concubines were Slavs, his viziers often Jewish or Christian. His Jewish doctor Hasdai ibn Shaprut served as ambassador and treasurer, corresponding with popes and with German and eastern emperors, as well as with the Jewish khagans of Khazaria.

Yet neither caliphal grandeur nor adab diminished Abd al-Rahman’s sybaritic ferocity. He presided over a harem of 6,750 females and 3,750 male slaves. A female slave who betrayed him was fed to the lions; a Christian boy – later St Pelagius – who rejected his advances was dismembered. These may be stock anti-Muslim stories, but he certainly relished his lack of ruth. His executioner, always ready with sword and leather mat, grew rich. Once, while he was beheading a concubine, her jewellery fell out of her hair and the caliph let him keep it. When one of his sons conspired against him, he publicly executed the boy himself.

He launched annual invasions of the north, always leading his own armies, until he was almost killed in battle. When the Vikings attacked al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman repelled them with his fleet, while he expanded along the European and African coasts, establishing a Côte d’Azur pirates’ nest at Fréjus and campaigning in Morocco, where his general was a Slavic eunuch nicknamed the Castrated Cockerell. His capture of Ceuta and Tangier gave him access to the trans-Saharan caravans, but just as he hoped to control the trans-Saharan trade, the caliph was foiled by a messianic dynasty that arose in an oasis halfway between Morocco and west Africa. The caliph^* would scarcely have believed that this obscure desert uprising would tilt the balance of Afro-Asia, challenge Constantinople, Cordoba and Baghdad and lead to the founding of the greatest Arab city of all: Cairo.

* The sole British king to be known as the Great, Alfred ruled only the south-west. Wales was divided between the Celtic kingdoms of Deheubarth, Powys and Gwynedd; Scotland was divided between the Celtic realms of Strathclyde and Alba and the Viking kingdom of Man in the western isles; the rest was ruled by the Vikings.

* Their conception of the human self was singular: they believed each person was divided into a hamr (the physical body), the hugr (the essence), the hamingja (the personification of luck) and the fylgja (a female spirit that was within even the most virile man).

* The Rus were traders, as one told the Arab envoy: ‘O my Lord, I have come from a far land and have with me such and such a number of girls and such and such a number of sables.’ Their hygiene shocked the envoy: ‘They’re the filthiest of God’s creatures – no modesty in defecation and urination, nor do they wash after orgasm, nor wash their hands after eating – like wild asses.’ Then there was the group sex: ‘Each man sits on a couch. With them are pretty slaves for sale to merchants: a man has sexual intercourse with his slave while his companion looks on. Sometimes whole groups come together in this fashion in the presence of others. A merchant who arrives to buy a slave from them may have to wait and look on while a Rus completes the act of intercourse with his slave …’

* Basil not only welcomed his patroness, Danielis, to court, he raised her to the title of Emperor’s Mother (basileometor) which says much about their relationship. The Greek-speaking Romaioi now called the empire Basileia Romaion – Roman monarchy and their emperor basileus – king.

* The early work of two missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, who had translated the Greek Bible into Slavic script, later developing into Cyrillic, meant these newly Christian people could understand the new services.